My current interests are centred on understanding the phenomenal processing speed achieved by the visual system. For a number of years we have been running experiments that attempt to measure just how fast visual processing is using briefly flashed natural scenes using a combination of electrophysiological and behavioural methods. With Holle Kirchner, we recently found that when two images aresimultaneously flashed to the left and right of the fixation point, humans can initiate saccades to the side where the scene contains an animal in only 130 ms. Such severe temporal constraints pose majorproblems for virtually all current theories of visual processing. In an attempt to explain this sort of ultra-rapid processing I proposed a novel coding scheme that uses the order in which cells fire spikes,rather than firing rates to encode information. It turns out that using such a code may allow us recognise objects when as few as 1% of the neurons in the visual pathways have fired a spike. In 1999, I setup a company (SpikeNet Technology) that has developed image processing software based on these principles. A demo of the software can be downloaded from the company web site (www.spikenet-technology.com).

I have recently become interested in questions of the economy and tax reform. You can find out more about my radical ideas here.

Techniques Used

I’m currently using mainly behavioural and ERP methods for the experimental work and computer simulation for the modelling. But in the past I have used a wide range of techniques including single unitrecording in awake monkeys and fMRI in humans.

Teaching

I regularly teach for the M2 Neurosciences, Cognition & Comportement and for the M2 Neuropsychology. I have also done teaching for various image processing courses.

My main collaborations within the lab are with Michèle Fabre-Thorpe, Leila Reddy, Emmanuel Barbeau, Florence Rémy and Alexandra Severac-Caquil. Outside the lab, I have close contacts with Daniel Pressnitzer and Yves Fregnac in Paris, Guillaume Masson in Marseille, Karl Gegenfurtner and Heiko Neumann in Germany, and Gustavo Deco in Spain.